Writing is hard, even in the best of circumstances. There have been times when I’ve been sat in my parents’ beautiful backyard in northern Vermont with no responsibilities pending, gentle spring sun on my skin, keyboard on my lap … and still, unable.

During the normal flow of life, the obstacles multiply. There’s work, laundry, trying to exercise, … a social life? …, dishes piling up in the sink. Time-management issues aside, the mental drain of it is enough to make writing feel impossible by the time there’s a spare moment for it.

To make matters worse, there are voices on all sides ready to tell you how wrong you’re doing it, if and when you manage to do it at all.

You have to write every day, they say. Or, why aren’t you reading more? Or, you better build your following online or no one’s going to care about your writing. Or, stop focusing so much on your following and get back to writing.

It’s stressful, and confusing, and heavy, and there are days that I find myself thinking “what am I even doing this for?”

There are sometimes weeks when I don’t write at all, and I think about letting it all just slip away. Let it be something I did, not something I do.

But somehow, I always find my way back to writing.

In college, a fiction professor gave me a simple piece of advice: “Don’t be a writer unless you can’t not.”

That’s a nice way of saying: “This is gonna suck! If you’ve got a shot in hell of being fulfilled without doing this, DON’T DO IT!”

Which is really just another way of saying what Franz Kafka said in a letter to Max Brod in July 1922:

“A non-writing writer is a monster courting insanity.”

That’s how I know I have to write. Because when I’m not writing, I become a monster courting insanity.

So I write because I can’t not. And maybe someday, that’ll mean something to a reader.

For now, I’m locked in a cycle of self-editing, revising, querying and collecting rejections like postage stamps. It’s fun, at times. Most of the time its just work. But it’s the kind of work my soul can’t live without.

It’s lonely work, though. So tell me, where are things at with your big writing project right now? Does it feel like writing is making you more human, or are you stuck in a monster period?